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Shogo Osaka

Shogo Osaka

Managing Director, Legal Operations, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, FedEx

Start Transforming Your Inhouse Legal Team with Zero Budget  

Inhouse legal team’s every day is occupied with firefighting. Little bandwidth remains to invest for the transformation for future. Many legal technologies look helpful but beyond the budget. Transformation of inhouse legal team must start from the people. To ignite people, you can start from a small initiative by forming a taskforce (perhaps just a few like-minded lawyers), identifying a high-volume low-value process, and developing a minimum viable product with already-available technologies e.g. Microsoft Power Platform. The small success can ignite other legal members which enable you to develop a bigger scale of solution and gradually start transforming the team.

  • Start with people, not expensive tech
  • Which process is most promising for the first initiative?
  • Start small with minimum viable product
  • Mindset change – no need to be perfect, fail early 
  • Ride on a big wave – align with corporate strategy and collaborate with other functions

Key Learnings

  1. People First, Not Tech: The most critical element for transformation is not a large budget for new technology, but the engagement and empowerment of your own team members. Change starts by igniting the passion of a few motivated individuals.
  2. Start Small to Win Big: Grand transformation doesn't happen overnight. The path to success is to start with a manageable, high-impact project (an MVP for a low-value process) and use that initial victory to build momentum and buy-in for larger initiatives.
  3. Mindset and Strategy Over Perfection: Lasting change requires a cultural shift. It's crucial to adopt a "fail early" mindset that values progress over perfection and to ensure your efforts are aligned with the broader corporate strategy to gain support and ride a bigger wave of change.

About Shogo

Shogo Osaka is the Managing Director of Legal Operations for Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa at FedEx. He leads a diverse team of legal professionals across the region, focusing on centralizing baseline legal work, redesigning workflows, and promoting technology adoption to optimize corporate in-house legal services.

His innovative approach has earned him multiple recognition, including being named In-House Lawyer of the Year at the Asian Legal Business Hong Kong Law Awards 2022. Under his leadership, his team won the Outstanding Legal Innovator Award 2023. His university-industry collaboration with the University of Hong Kong was also recognized as the 2022 Legal Innovation in Operations project by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC).
Before joining FedEx, Shogo worked at Freshfields in Shanghai and Tokyo, where he supported multinational clients’ cross-border transactions and was seconded to the Japan Bank for International Cooperation.

Shogo is admitted to practice law in Japan and holds both Bachelor of Laws and Master in Laws degrees from the University of Tokyo.

Sessions